Today’s blog post is by a guest author, Adel du Toit, who is currently spearheading the effort by Cisco’s internal IT organization to deliver IT-as-a-Service internally, dubbed the Cisco IT “eStore.” Recently, the eStore team took home multiple awards, you can read more about that here. (If you’re not familiar with the eStore, be sure to check out my other blog posts regarding the eStore here and here.)

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Over the last few months I had to take a few steps back and admire the passion and dedication of the team as our Vision is starting to become a reality. For those less familiar with the Cisco IT eStore, have a look at the latest customer case study here. You can also check out the demo video below:

In the last few months the eStore team has delivered IT services, to any device, simply, while achieving broad adoption while showcasing Cisco as the #1 IT Company thanks to Cisco Prime Service Catalog, which is the underlying foundation for our end-user storefront interface.

Delivered IT services:

We have 2 ways of delivering IT services and apps. In estore.cisco.com employees can find the IT services that one needs to order from a desktop or laptop computer. As for mobile devices, employees can go to eStore for Mobile to install the apps he or she needs to stay productive whilst on the go.

Today we have nearly 290 IT services and mobile apps that our users can choose from:

To Any Device:

It is important to embrace BYOD and at Cisco we live this every day. It was important that the store we created could be used by any device.

Below is a breakdown of the device types that have accessed both eStore over the last 6 months.

User experience is important to us and we wanted to make sure that the store provides a similar experience to what you would expect when shopping at Amazon or eBay, for example.

In both our mobile and web interface we have the ability to surface the apps and services most needed by our end users:

The Cisco IT eStore (Desktop Version)

The Cisco IT eStore (on iOS mobile)

Adding spotlight content and recommendations is important to help with findability and user experience. This was made possible by the latest release of Cisco Prime Service Catalog, which introduced a next-generation user interface and powers the storefront that the eStore is built on. Be sure to check out Phillipe’s post on the latest release here.

Achieving broad adoption…

One of the most recently added features in the internal Cisco IT eStore has been the addition of desktop software for employees to download. Going forward, we expect to see around 20k unique visitors a month ordering Desktop Software from eStore. For the first time we will have a single, unified platform for both Mac and Windows users to install their software from.

In addition, during our Global Sales Conference (GSX) in Las Vegas in late August we had the requirements to support 18,000 Sales users downloading the recommended mobile apps during the event. We had to be ready to surface the apps, but also support 18k users downloading the event app in a 15 minute period!

Lots of long hours and planning later, we made sure that all of this happened seamlessly, here are a few statistics from the event:

– 89% of the GSX attendees installed eStore for Mobile

– During the event we had 5.4k average visits a day

– 81% of the attendees installed the GSX event app from the store

– 49% of the attendees also installed other apps in addition to downloading the event app

– Very few support issues (less than 40 total!)

– Our max CPU stayed below 12%

– With an average load response time of 1.7 secs

If we take a step back and also look at our overall adoption for Q4, FY14 the numbers look very healthy. Nearly 50k requisitions in the 3 months period from May to July 2014.

…While showcasing Cisco as the #1 IT Company

The Cisco eStore team is no stranger to awards, and we continue to add our trophy cabinet with our latest award, the Gold Stevie Winner for Information Technology Team of the Year. For more information on the latest awards, be sure to check out this blog post detailing all of the awards we won this year at the International Business Awards.

Want to learn more? We have a webinar coming up on October 8th at 8 am PDT where we will discuss best practices for delivering Enterprise IT-as-a-Service, and delve deeper into the latest developments in both the Cisco IT eStore and Cisco Prime Service Catalog. You can register here.

Thanks for reading. For more info be sure to follow us on Twitter @CiscoIT to learn more about the Cisco IT eStore, and follow @CiscoUM for the latest info on Prime Service Catalog.

The ability of companies to innovate is more important than ever. To respond rapidly to evolving business trends, or change the way they interact with customers, companies need a powerful platform for innovation that can analyze huge data volumes to identify new customer patterns, adapt quickly to new market opportunities and adjust their business processes to maximize growth and profitability.

But how easy is this to do? What do you need to do to adapt to new business models and react to changing market opportunities?

Hear how Cisco, eBay and Adobe are fundamentally changing their customer interactions to capture business opportunities.

Find out more and join us for a Webinar on Thursday, July 17, to hear how these leading companies are using SAP HANA to change the way they do business.

-Bob Parker, IDC Group Vice president, on rapidly changing business landscapes in the digital world
-How Cisco is using the power of SAP HANA on Cisco UCS to transform sales forecasting and streamline business processes
-How eBay leverages predictive analytics to power their early signal detection system for sellers and buyers
-How Adobe delivers superior customer experience in real-time on any device by leveraging data from multiple sources.

We’ve been hearing from some of our customers that they are interested in using Cisco Meraki in their branches alongside their Cisco infrastructure in their main offices, but were worried about having to deal with too many segregated policy management systems.

Good news: Interoperability between Cisco Meraki and ISE is here. Administrators can now define a single user access policy across on-premise and cloud-managed networks.With this interoperability, Cisco infrastructure customers can now deploy Cisco Meraki in their branches in the same network as other Cisco equipment, with all devices across the network managed under ISE for unified access policy management.

Read more about the Cisco Meraki and ISE interoperability in the blog post: Got ISE?

To get a free Meraki wireless access point and learn more about the solution, join one of our online webinars. See the complete schedule and choose from a range of webinars featuring Meraki customers, product and solution overviews, and topics like BYOD.

Organizations are moving from just dealing with bring your own device (BYOD) and the influx of mobile devices to proactively developing solutions that use the full power of mobility. Because of the complexities and fluid technology horizon, this is often simpler said than done. Now you can simplify and accelerate your mobility projects by deploying a comprehensive mobility solution that has been tested and validated end to end. Read More »

Eight weeks ago, Cisco launched the Cisco IoT Security Grand Challenge, an industry-wide initiative to bring the global security community together to secure the IoT. Despite its overwhelming business benefits, IoT adoption also significantly increases security risks. So this Challenge is really just a blatant attempt to bring the best and brightest security minds to the table to help us find innovative IoT security solutions. Thus far, it’s worked – we have some fantastic submissions. But we know there are more out there and we’d love to see what you can do!

If you’re interested in learning more about the Challenge, please plan to attend a free one hour webinar on Wednesday, May 7, 2014 at 12:00pm EDT. Dave Evans, Cisco’s Chief Futurist, and Dr. Tao Zhang, Cisco’s Chief Scientist for Smart Connected Vehicles, will talk about why the Challenge is so important to the future of IoT, and answer any questions you may have. This is a live, interactive webinar, so bring your specific questions. I’ll see you there!

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